


Love Their Loves

by raving_liberal



Category: Sense8 (TV)
Genre: Character Study, Cluster As Family, Cluster Feels, Gen, Love, OT8, Post-Season/Series 01, Sense8 Christmas Special
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-18
Updated: 2017-05-18
Packaged: 2018-11-02 05:46:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 940
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10938234
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/raving_liberal/pseuds/raving_liberal
Summary: Shared connections and shared lives, but unique ways of loving.





	Love Their Loves

Riley loves like a mother with no child. She both craves and fears attachment. She expects loss and pain. Like a mother, she shows her love through attention paid, in details remembered. Riley knows each of her seven other selves’ favorite color. She knows the feel and flavor of their favorite food on their tongues. She knows the holes in their hearts, the spaces that held mothers, fathers, siblings, friends. She goes into those spaces and fills them with soft and selfless love. She puts steel in their spines so gently that they think it's silk. She holds Will, and through him, she holds them all, singing them to sleep with a sorrowful lullaby. 

Nomi was the first to surrender the idea of a unique and isolated self. Nomi lived the We of the cluster before anyone else. She knows best of all how it feels for yourself to not feel like yourself. She’d felt alien in her own body once. Feeling slightly detached from her mind and emotions, while initially distressing, wasn't outside her scope of understanding. She wanted each connection, each new self, and she had Amanita to share them with, without fear of judgment or rejection. Nomi keenly felt each distinct mind, each distinct self, the network of thoughts and feelings, and she welcomed them. I am a We, she told them. We, together. None of you are alone.

Lito’s love is larger than life, theatrical and big and full of noise and color. Any one of them could turn in an instant and find him there, thrilled by what thrills them, drunk on what intoxicates them. No attention paid to Lito is too much, but he pays the attention back as fervently as he receives it. He's there to coo over Will, fading in and out of haunted sleep. He's there to put a hand between Sun’s fist and the hard concrete wall. He weeps with Kala, rages with Wolfgang, delights with Capheus. He comes to Nomi again and again, his dearest sister and kindred soul. Through it all, he broadcasts his own passions clearly, until the whole cluster knows the taste of Hernando’s lips and the glorious chime of Dani’s laughter and the faultless adoration of Mama. 

Capheus loves them. No need for qualification or explanation. He simply loves them. He loves them so much that it fills him, engulfs him with light. He loves them each differently but equally, seven different loves with seven unique flavors, and he could not say any one was more or less a part of him than he could disavow his own fingers or toes. They are seven extensions of Capheus’s pure, blameless love. He goes to them with joy, worry, questions, and he finds an answering connection. 

Wolfgang doesn't love them, or at least, not most of them. You don't love your own heart or your kidneys or liver. These things are inside you, and you need them. You would feel their absence, but love? No. Need, yes. Reliance, a bit more than he's comfortable with. His blood runs through them. They make it cleaner, fill it with nourishment, give it oxygen so he can breathe. He feels them all, deep in every cell, but he only loves one of them. That’s what he tells himself. 

Kala reaches for them constantly, but none more than Wolfgang, who pushes back just as hard as she reaches. Sometimes she seeks out Riley, for the reassurance that yes, they are all part of one another, but some of them more so than others. Nobody could call Riley selfish for loving Will, so surely this implies Kala can love Wolfgang in a different and deeper way without it being something wrong. She’s drawn to water now. She can't look at water anymore without seeing him there. Always, her Wolfgang, surrounded by water. Kala was born in rain and Wolfgang in a pool. This means something. It means everything.

Sun’s love is a cyclone, a hurricane, a monsoon. It hits the rest of them hard and fierce, knocking the air from their lungs. In that moment, her love is a sheet of driving rain that beats upon their skin. It’s the whip of wind that throws them back, staggering. Sun doesn't know how to best love them all, but the ones she understands, she loves with a strike of the fist when they need it most. She understands Wolfgang, as broken and indomitable as she. She understands Capheus, loyal to a fault, if too naive and kindhearted. Will and Riley, she pities. Nomi feels practical, which Sun appreciates, but Kala is moody and hopelessly dreamy, and Lito is overwrought. She can't stop herself from visiting them, but she sometimes wishes her other selves were a bit more like her original self.

When Will dreams, they're there. Their features blur, but he can feel them there, pulsing like a heartbeat. When he surfaces, he’s in Riley’s arms, pale and thin and scarred and stronger than steel. He wakes to seven pairs of eyes watching him, seven pairs of hands steadying him, and even when he doesn’t know where he is, he knows who he is. He is part of Riley, and she is part of him, and they are both a part of this aching but fearless family. Will wants to know them better. He wants the time and freedom to learn them, each as distinct as a fingerprint, but familiar as a memory. When he sinks into the dark again, he can still see them around him, a halo of light that flickers and dims until the only lifeline left is Riley’s love.


End file.
